Because there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishinglanguages from dialects, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots.[8] Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects do exist, these often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English at the other.[9] Scots is often regarded as one of the ancient varieties of English, yet it has its own distinct dialects.[8] Alternatively, Scots is sometimes treated as a distinct Germanic language, in the way Norwegian is closely linked to, yet distinct from, Danish.[8]

A 2010 Scottish Government study of "public attitudes towards the Scots language" found that 64% of respondents (around 1,000 individuals being a representative sample of Scotland's adult population) "don't really think of Scots as a language", but it also found that "the most frequent speakers are least likely to agree that it is not a language (58%) and those never speaking Scots most likely to do so (72%)".[10] In the 2011 Scottish census, a question on Scots language ability was featured.

Nomenclature

Originally known as Inglis by it's native speakers, they now sometimes refer to their vernacular as braid Scots (or "broad Scots" in English)[11] or use a dialect name such as the "Doric",[12] or the "Buchan Claik".[13] The old-fashioned Scotch, an English loan,[14] occurs occasionally, especially in Northern Ireland.[15][16] The term Lallans, a variant of the Modern Scots word lawlands[ˈlo̜ːlən(d)z, ˈlɑːlənz],[17] is also used, though this is more often taken to mean the Lallansliterary form.[18] Scots in Ireland is known in official circles as Ulster-Scots (Ulstèr-Scotch in revivalist Ulster-Scots) or "Ullans", a recent neologism merging Ulster and Lallans.[19]

Etymology

Scots is a contraction of Scottis, the Older Scots[20] and northern version of late Old EnglishScottisc (modern English "Scottish"), which replaced the earlier i-mutated version Scyttisc.[21][22] Before the end of the 15th century, English speech in Scotland was known as "English" (written Ynglis or Inglis at the time), whereas "Scottish" (Scottis) referred to Gaelic.

By the beginning of the 15th century, the English language used in Scotland had arguably become a distinct language, albeit one lacking a name which clearly distinguished it from all the other English variants and dialects spoken in Britain. From 1495 the term Scottis was increasingly used to refer to the Lowland vernacular[8] and Erse, meaning Irish, as a name for Gaelic. For example, towards the end of the 15th century, William Dunbar was using Erse to refer to Gaelic and, in the early 16th century, Gavin Douglas was using Scottis as a name for the Lowland vernacular.[23][24] The Gaelic of Scotland is now usually called Scottish Gaelic.

From the thirteenth century Early Scots spread further into Scotland via the burghs, proto-urban institutions which were first established by King David I. The growth in prestige of Early Scots in the fourteenth century, and the complementary decline of French in Scotland, made Scots the prestige language of most of eastern Scotland. By the sixteenth century Middle Scots had established orthographic and literary norms largely independent of those developing in England.[30] From 1610 to the 1690s during the Plantation of Ulster large numbers of Scots-speaking Lowlanders, some 200,000, settled there.[31] In the core areas of Scots settlement, Scots outnumbered English settlers by five or six to one.[32]Modern Scots is used to describe the language after 1700 when southern Modern English was generally adopted as the literary language though Scots remained the vernacular.

The linguist Heinz Kloss considered Modern Scots a Halbsprache (half language) in terms of an abstand and ausbau languages framework[34] although today, in Scotland, most people's speech is somewhere on a continuum ranging from traditional broad Scots to Scottish Standard English. Many speakers are either diglossic and/or able to code-switch along the continuum depending on the situation in which they find themselves. Where on this continuum English-influenced Scots becomes Scots-influenced English is difficult to determine. Because standard English now generally has the role of a Dachsprache, disputes often arise as to whether the varieties of Scots are dialects of Scottish English or constitute a separate language in their own right.[35][36]

Notwithstanding the UK government’s and the Scottish Executive’s obligations under part II of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, the Scottish Executive recognises and respects Scots (in all its forms) as a distinct language, and does not consider the use of Scots to be an indication of poor competence in English.

Evidence for its existence as a separate language lies in the extensive body of Scots literature, its independent – if somewhat fluid – orthographic conventions and in its former use as the language of the original Parliament of Scotland.[38] Because Scotland retained distinct political, legal, and religious systems after the Union, many Scots terms passed into Scottish English.

Language shift

From the mid-sixteenth century, written Scots was increasingly influenced by the developing Standard English of Southern England due to developments in royal and political interactions with England.[39]

When an English herald spoke to Mary of Guise and her councillors in 1560, at first they spoke in the "Scottyshe toung", but then he, "not well understanding", they continued in her native French.[40]King James VI, who in In 1603 became King James I of England, observed in his work The Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Prose that "For albeit sindrie has written of it in Engish, quhilk is lykest to our language ..." however, with the increasing influence and availability of books printed in England, most writing in Scotland came to be done in the English fashion.[41] After King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England the Protestant Church of Scotland adopted the 1611 Authorized King James Version of the Bible and the Acts of Union 1707 which led to England joining Scotland to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, having a single Parliament of Great Britain based in London. After the Union and the shift of political power to England, the use of Scots was discouraged by many in authority and education, as was the notion of Scottishness itself.[42] Many leading Scots of the period, such as David Hume, considered themselves Northern British rather than Scottish.[43] They attempted to rid themselves of their Scots in a bid to establish standard English as the official language of the newly formed union. Nevertheless, Scots was still spoken across a wide range of domains until the end of the seventeenth century,[41] illustrated for example, in the summary by Frederick Pottle, James Boswell's twentieth-century biographer, concerning James's view of the speech habits of his father Alexander Boswell, a judge of the Supreme Courts of Scotland:

"He scorned modern literature, spoke broad Scots from the bench, and even in writing took no pains to avoid the Scotticisms which most of his colleagues were coming to regard as vulgar."

Others did however scorn Scots, such as intellectuals from the Scottish Enlightenment like David Hume and Adam Smith, who went to great lengths to get rid of every Scotticism from their writings.[44] Following such examples, many well-off Scots took to learning English through the activities of those such as Thomas Sheridan, who in 1761 gave a series of lectures on English elocution. Charging a guinea at a time (about £100 in today's money,[45]) they were attended by over 300 men, and he was made a freeman of the City of Edinburgh. Following this, some of the city's intellectuals formed the Select Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland. From such eighteenth-century activities grew Scottish Standard English.[46] Scots remained the vernacular of many rural communities and the growing number of urban working class Scots.[47]

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the use of Scots as a literary language was revived by several prominent Scotsmen such as Robert Burns. Such writers established a new cross-dialect literary norm.

During the first half of the twentieth century, knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary norms waned, and currently there is no institutionalised standard literary form.[48] By the 1940s, the Scottish Education Department's language policy was that Scots had no value "...it is not the language of 'educated' people anywhere, and could not be described as a suitable medium of education or culture".[49] Students reverted to Scots outside the classroom, but the reversion was not complete. What occurred, and has been occurring ever since, is a process of language attrition, whereby successive generations have adopted more and more features from Standard English. This process has accelerated rapidly since widespread access to mass media in English, and increased population mobility, became available after the Second World War.[50] It has recently taken on the nature of wholesale language shift, sometimes also termed language change, convergence or merger. By the end of the twentieth century, Scots was at an advanced stage of language death over much of Lowland Scotland.[51] Residual features of Scots are often regarded as slang.[52] A Scottish Government study in 2010 found that 64% of respondents (being a representative sample of Scotland's adult population) "don't really think of Scots as a language", however, "the most frequent speakers are least likely to agree that it is not a language (58%) and those never speaking Scots most likely to do so (72%)".[10]

Language revitalisation

File:William Wye Smith-The New Testament in Braid Scots.pdf Recently, attitudes have somewhat changed, and the status of the language has been raised in schools in Scotland.[53] Scots is now included in the new national school curriculum.[54] Previously in Scotland's schools there had been little education taking place through the medium of Scots, although it may have been covered superficially in English lessons, which could entail reading some Scots literature and observing the local dialect. Much of the material used was often Standard English disguised as Scots, which caused upset among proponents of Standard English and proponents of Scots alike.[55] One example of the educational establishment's approach to Scots is "Write a poem in Scots. (It is important not to be worried about spelling in this – write as you hear the sounds in your head.)",[56] whereas guidelines for English require teaching pupils to be "writing fluently and legibly with accurate spelling and punctuation."[57]

The use of Scots in the media is scant and is usually reserved for niches where local dialect is deemed acceptable, e.g. comedy, Burns Night, or representations of traditions and times gone by. Serious use for news, encyclopaedias, documentaries, etc. rarely occurs in Scots, although the Scottish Parliament website offered some information in it.[58]

Number of speakers

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The proportion of respondents in the 2011 census in Scotland aged 3 and above who stated that they can speak Scots.

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The proportion of respondents in the 2011 census in Northern Ireland aged 3 and above who stated that they can speak Ulster-Scots.

It has been difficult to determine the number of speakers of Scots via census, because many respondents might interpret the question "Do you speak Scots?" in different ways. Campaigners for Scots pressed for this question to be included in the 2001 UK National Census. The results from a 1996 trial before the Census, by the General Register Office for Scotland,[59] suggested that there were around 1.5 million speakers of Scots, with 30% of Scots responding "Yes" to the question "Can you speak the Scots language?", but only 17% responding "Aye" to the question "Can you speak Scots?".[citation needed] (It was also found that older, working-class people were more likely to answer in the affirmative.) The University of Aberdeen Scots Leid Quorum performed its own research in 1995, cautiously suggesting that there were 2.7 million speakers, though with clarification as to why these figures required context.[60]

The GRO questions, as freely acknowledged by those who set them, were not as detailed and as systematic as the Aberdeen University ones, and only included reared speakers, not those who had learned the language. Part of the difference resulted from the central question posed by surveys: "Do you speak Scots?". In the Aberdeen University study, the question was augmented with the further clause "… or a dialect of Scots such as Border etc", which resulted in greater recognition from respondents. The GRO concluded that there simply wasn't enough linguistic self-awareness amongst the Scottish populace, with people still thinking of themselves as speaking badly pronounced, grammatically inferior English rather than Scots, for an accurate census to be taken. The GRO research concluded that "[a] more precise estimate of genuine Scots language ability would require a more in-depth interview survey and may involve asking various questions about the language used in different situations. Such an approach would be inappropriate for a Census." Thus, although it was acknowledged that the "inclusion of such a Census question would undoubtedly raise the profile of Scots", no question about Scots was, in the end, included in the 2001 Census.[35][61][62] The Scottish Government's Pupils in Scotland Census 2008[63] found that 306 pupils spoke Scots as their main home language. A Scottish Government study in 2010 found that 85% of respondents (being a representative sample of Scotland's adult population) claim to speak Scots to varying degrees.[10]

The 2011 UK census was the first to ask residents of Scotland about Scots. A campaign called Aye Can was set up to help individuals answer the question.[64][65] The specific wording used was "Which of these can you do? Tick all that apply" with options for 'Understand', 'Speak', 'Read' and 'Write' in three columns: English, Scottish Gaelic and Scots.[66] Of approximately 5.1 million respondents, about 1.2 million (24%) could speak, read and write Scots, 3.2 million (62%) had no skills in Scots and the remainder had some degree of skill, such as understanding Scots (0.27 million, 5.2%) or being able to speak it but not read or write it (0.18 million, 3.5%).[67] There were also small numbers of Scots speakers recorded in England and Wales on the 2011 Census, with the largest numbers being either in bordering areas (e.g. Carlisle) or in areas that had recruited large numbers of Scottish workers in the past (e.g. Corby or the former mining areas of Kent).[68]

In 1955 three Ayrshire men, 'Sandy' MacMillan, an English teacher at Ayr Academy, Thomas Limond, noted town Chamberlain of Ayr, and A.L. (Ross) Taylor, Rector of Cumnock Academy collaborated to write Bairnsangs (Child Songs),[70] a collection of children's nursery rhymes and poems in Scots. The book contains a five-page glossary of contemporary Scots words and their pronunciations.

Alexander Gray's translations into Scots constitute the greater part of his work, and are the main basis for his reputation.

The eighteenth-century Scots revival saw the introduction of a new literary language descended from the old court Scots, but with an orthography that had abandoned some of the more distinctive old Scots spellings[75] and adopted many standard English spellings. Despite the updated spelling, however, the rhymes make it clear that a Scots pronunciation was intended.[76] These writings also introduced what came to be known as the apologetic apostrophe,[77] generally occurring where a consonant exists in the Standard English cognate. This Written Scots drew not only on the vernacular but also on the King James Bible and was also heavily influenced by the norms and conventions of Augustan English poetry.[78] Consequently, this written Scots looked very similar to contemporary Standard English, suggesting a somewhat modified version of that, rather than a distinct speech form with a phonological system which had been developing independently for many centuries.[79] This modern literary dialect, ‘Scots of the book’ or Standard Scots[80][81] once again gave Scots an orthography of its own, lacking neither “authority nor author.”[82] This literary language used throughout Lowland Scotland and Ulster,[83] embodied by writers such as Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Murray, David Herbison, James Orr, James Hogg and William Laidlaw among others, is well described in the 1921 Manual of Modern Scots.[84]

Other authors developed dialect writing, preferring to represent their own speech in a more phonological manner rather than following the pan-dialect conventions of modern literary Scots,[76] especially for the northern[85] and insular dialects of Scots.

During the twentieth century a number of proposals for spelling reform were presented. Commenting on this, John Corbett (2003: 260) writes that "devising a normative orthography for Scots has been one of the greatest linguistic hobbies of the past century." Most proposals entailed regularising the use of established eighteenth and nineteenth century conventions, in particular the avoidance of the apologetic apostrophe which supposedly represented "missing" English letters. Such letters were never actually missing in Scots. For example, in the fourteenth century, Barbour spelt the Scots cognate of 'taken' as tane. Because there has been no k in the word for over 700 years, representing its omission with an apostrophe seems pointless. The current spelling is usually taen.

Through the twentieth century, with the decline of spoken Scots and knowledge of the literary tradition, phonetic (often humorous) representations became more common.

Sample text of Modern Scots

From The New Testament in Scots (William Laughton Lorimer 1885–1967) Mathew:1:18ff

This is the storie o the birth o Jesus Christ. His mither Mary wis trystit til Joseph, but afore they war mairriet she wis fund tae be wi bairn bi the Halie Spírit. Her husband Joseph, honest man, hed nae mind tae affront her afore the warld an wis for brakkin aff their tryst hidlinweys; an sae he wis een ettlin tae dae, whan an angel o the Lord kythed til him in a draim an said til him, “Joseph, son o Dauvit, be nane feared tae tak Mary your trystit wife intil your hame; the bairn she is cairrein is o the Halie Spírit. She will beir a son, an the name ye ar tae gíe him is Jesus, for he will sauf his fowk frae their sins.”

Aa this happent at the wurd spokken bi the Lord throu the Prophet micht be fulfilled: Behaud, the virgin wil bouk an beir a son, an they will caa his name Immanuel – that is, “God wi us”.

Whan he hed waukit frae his sleep, Joseph did as the angel hed bidden him, an tuik his trystit wife hame wi him. But he bedditna wi her or she buir a son; an he caa’d the bairn Jesus.

Translated into Standard English:

This is the story of the birth of Jesus Christ. His mother Mary was trusted to Joseph, but before they were married she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, honest man, had no intent to affront her before the world and was for breaking off their tryst secretly; and while he was deciding what to do, when an angel of the Lord came to him in a dream and said to him, "Joseph, son of David, be not afraid to take Mary your trusted wife into your home; the child she is carrying is of the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and the name you are to give him is Jesus, for he will save his folk from their sins."

And this happened at the word spoken by the Lord through the Prophet might be fulfilled: Behold, the Virgin will be with child and bear a son, and they will call his name Immanuel - that is, "God With Us".

When he had woken from his sleep, Joseph did as the angel had bidden him, and took his trusted wife home with him. But he bedded not with her before she bore a son; and he called the child Jesus.

Grammar

Modern Scots follows the subject–verb–object sentence structure as does Standard English. However, the word order He turnt oot the licht to 'He turned the light out' and Gie's it (Give us it) to 'Give it to me' may be preferred.[86]

The indefinite articlea may be used before both consonants and vowels. The definite article the is used before the names of seasons, days of the week, many nouns, diseases, trades and occupations, sciences and academic subjects.[87] It is also often used in place of the indefinite article and instead of a possessive pronoun.[88]

Scots includes some irregular plurals such as ee/een (eye/eyes), cauf/caur (calf/calves), horse/horse (horse/horses), cou/kye (cow/cows) and shae/shuin (shoe/shoes) that do not occur in Standard English.[89][90]Nouns of measure and quantity remain unchanged in the plural.[90][91]

The relative pronoun is that for all persons and numbers, but may be elided.[90][92] Modern Scots also has a third adjective/adverb this-that-yon/yonder (thon/thonder) indicating something at some distance.[90]Thir and thae are the plurals of this and that respectively.

The present tense of verbs adheres to the Northern subject rule whereby verbs end in -s in all persons and numbers except when a single personal pronoun is next to the verb.[90][93] Certain verbs are often used progressively[90] and verbs of motion may be dropped before an adverb or adverbial phrase of motion.[86]

Many verbs have strong or irregular forms which are distinctive from Standard English.[90][94] The regular past form of the weak or regular verbs is -it, -t or -ed, according to the preceding consonant or vowel.[90][95]

The present participle and gerundin are now usually /ən/[96] but may still be differentiated /ən/ and /in/ in Southern Scots[97] and, /ən/ and /ɪn/ North Northern Scots.

^5 Spelt th. In Mid Northern varieties an intervocallic /ð/ may be realised /d/.[104] Initial 'th' in thing, think and thank, etc. may be /h/.[105]

^6 Both /s/ and /z/ may be spelt s or se. Z is seldom used for /z/ but may occur in some words as a substitute for the older ⟨ȝ⟩ (yogh) realised /jɪ/ or /ŋ/. For example: brulzie (broil), gaberlunzie (a beggar) and the names Menzies, Finzean, Culzean, Mackenzie etc.

^9W/w/ and wh/ʍ/, older /xʍ/, do not merge.[106] Northern dialects also have /f/ for /ʍ/.[105] The cluster wr may be realised /wr/, more often /r/, but may be /vr/ in Northern dialects[105] e.g. wrack (wreck), wrang (wrong), write, wrocht (worked), etc.